


Pink

by cable69



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 02:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5649961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cable69/pseuds/cable69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody talked to Kirk about anything but the Enterprise and its business with Starfleet and the Federation for three days, and they were just starting to say simple things like “good morning” and “your hair looks weird today” (Sulu, of course) when Spock finally came out of his quarters, at which point they stopped talking almost entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pink

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on ff.net; unedited

Nobody talked to Kirk about anything but the Enterprise and its business with Starfleet and the Federation for three days, and they were just starting to say simple things like “good morning” and “your hair looks weird today” (Sulu, of course) when Spock finally came out of his quarters, at which point they stopped talking almost entirely.

Finally Kirk asked Bones to have dinner with him. But Bones didn’t show up at the right cafeteria, and Kirk had to track him down to the ten-forward, where he witnessed Bones running from the room, and Kirk wasn’t willing to use the emergency override to find his CMO, so he laid in wait for Bones outside sickbay for two hours the next day and, when Bones finally came out, dragged him bodily into a supply closet nearby.

“I don’t wanna talk about it!” Bones yelled, flailing a lot, and it was lucky for him that Kirk had been first in their class in hand-to-hand combat, because Kirk was the only reason all of the shelves weren’t falling down on them.

“Bones!” Kirk hissed, shoving a bottle of coolant back onto a wire rack and deflecting cleaning devices with his elbows. “Calm the fuck down!”

“I’m not listenin’! Lalalalalala!” Bones clapped his hands over his ears and hummed loudly. Kirk snatched a box of spare parts out of the air, saving Bones’s left big toe from certain nail-crackage.

“It is your duty as my—Bones!” Kirk yanked Bones’s hands off of his ears. “Bones! It is your duty as my best friend—”

“LALALALALAL—”

“I’ll tell Gaila about that time with the Klingons and you’ll never hear the end of it,” hissed Kirk, miffed that he had to waste that excellent piece of blackmail for something like this. Bones shut up, but he glared absolute daggers at Kirk.

“What,” Bones snapped.

“Spock’s still not speaking to me and you have to help me,” whined Kirk. “Nobody else will have sex with me anymore. They’re all afraid of him.”

“That is not—Jim! Oh my everlovin’ lord, this is why… okay.” Bones put a stern hand on Kirk’s shoulder. “Nobody else is talkin’ to ya either.”

“That’s because they think that Spock will kill them for speaking to me, which is not going to happen,” said Kirk patiently.

“No, I think that’s a pretty realistic fear, actually,” said Bones, his eyebrows climbing into his hair. “I mean, his hair is still pink.”

“It’ll wash out!” Kirk shrieked. “Okay. Yes. Calm.” He took a few deep breaths. “Listen. It’s been a week.”

“I think the recovery time for somethin’ like this is fifty years,” said Bones frankly.

“I am missing out on so many orgasms,” said Kirk, leveling his finger at Bones. “Do you even know what the Vulcan refractory period is? It isn’t. This is a life-and-death matter.”

“I agree. Our lives. Your death.”

“Argh!” Kirk articulated. “Help! You’re my best friend!”

“No, I’m your only friend.”

“Hah! You admit that you’re my friend!”

“Jim, when it gets bad enough that you need to trick people—”

“Less commentary, more helping, friend.”

x

During Uhura’s birthday party, Kirk convinced Spock to sneak off for a quickie on the bridge, since everybody else was otherwise occupied below decks and also because he had a Thing for the captain’s chair. What followed became part of Starfleet informal history. There was a deeply unfortunate incident with the bridge security cameras and the feed switch and the projection screen at the party room, and Kirk honestly didn’t know how the hair dye had gotten involved, much less the blow torch. (He blamed Uhura’s taste for crème brûlée for that.) The sum of it was that there was video of Spock running shrieking through the corridors with bubblegum pink hair, his uniform (or what was left of it) burning merrily. To make matters worse, he somehow stumbled into the transporter room and ended up in a Deltan council meeting five parsecs away. (Scotty still hadn’t figured out the physics for that.)

Nobody would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever dream of using that type of footage against Spock, because they valued their lives. But by the next day everybody on the ship had seen it, and while they weren’t about to laugh directly at Spock about it, there was a definite echo of giggling in the corridors.

There were a lot of worst bits, but one of them was that two days after the incident, Pike checked in, and Kirk had to tell him a summary of what had happened, which obviously he played down because he, too, valued his life. However, Pike, being human (thus curious) and also being Pike (thus shockingly annoying), somehow squeezed video footage out of somebody, and then actually talked to Spock about it.

“I mean, I thought he looked crazy when he was on fire,” said Kirk, very quietly, to Uhura, who he’d had to pin to a wall to discuss this with. “I couldn’t see the whites in his eyes, his pupils had dilated so big. It was scary!”

“I am going to hurt you,” said Uhura slowly, like she was talking to a toddler, “if you do not let me go.”

“And then, he actually threw his cup at me! And missed! And then I had to fl-URK—”

Uhura had kneed him in the groin. “I don’t want to die!” she shouted at him as she ran for the transporter.

Kirk wheezed for the rest of the day and threw spitballs at the back of Uhura’s head in the cafeteria because he was basically a child (or at least Bones said). Sulu didn’t give any advice at all, just stood there and listened to Kirk babbling at him and then said something fully unhelpful and off-topic like “I heard the new Klingon crew member plays bocce ball” or “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” which was actually a kind of brilliant approach because Kirk would be silently furious at him and then storm off and then all of Sulu’s Kirk-related problems were solved for the day. Kirk didn’t bother going to Chekov, who still had not asked Sulu out on a date even though they had awkwardly hooked up pretty much every time there was shore leave, alcohol, or a life-or-death situation. And Scotty wasn’t any help either. He simply could not be spared from his sandwiches and engines. Also he was overly willing to talk to Kirk about The Incident and waggled his eyebrows a lot and said things like “feisty Vulcan members” and “och aye, flamin’ pantaloons,” although Kirk was willing to admit that Scotty’s accent was worse when drunk (as in, when anybody was drunk).

Basically Kirk had no friends and it was sad.

“The only advice I have for you, mister, is to buy a Bornian boquet and a really nice bottle of lube and probably some chocolate, too, because that’s the only way you’re ever going to get any again,” said Chapel, who was afraid of no creature, not even Spock. This was over breakfast one morning while she was drinking her eighth cup of coffee, black, and drafting a paper on the nucleotidic asymptotic ramifications of infecting an immature Orion with a .445-cell count variation of Azelgabber’s Disease. Kirk, meanwhile, kind of wanted to pick his nose.

That day on the bridge there was yet another incident with the Neutral Zone (“I’ll get the paperwork template,” said Uhura with a sigh) that required Spock to do Complicated Science to get them out of an equally complicated situation. So Spock said more than eight words in a row to Kirk, which falsely boosted Kirk’s perception of their relationship, and later that day Kirk raided the [greenhouse] for a boquet full of Borinan flowers, replicated a bottle of lube, actually went to the single functioning kitchen on the Enterprise and made Spock some truffles, and knocked on Spock’s door.

Maybe I should have put on a Kevlar vest, Kirk thought as he waited.

Spock opened the door and stared at the boquet.

“Hi!” said Kirk.

Spock stared at Kirk.

“I brought this and this and this,” said Kirk, extending the flowers and the lube and the truffles.

Spock eyed the offerings.

“Also I love you.”

Spock got this expression on his face that heavily implied that the feeling was so far from mutual that you could get an excellent mathematical theory of infinity out of the huge distance between their feelings.

“A lot.”

The theory could win billions of dollars in prize money and change the world.

“And I’m really, really sorry.”

Spock blinked. “Are you sure, Jim?”

“Oh my God, yes, I’m so sure,” Kirk babbled, totally relieved that Spock had addressed him in a social context. “I’m, like, the surest. I’m so sure I could spit. I would swear on this sureness. This sureness is as important a part of me as is my penis.”

Spock blinked again, but this blink was hugely sarcastic, and Kirk stopped talking.

“My hair is no longer pink,” Spock acknowledged, and it was much of an “I forgive you” that Kirk was going to get. There were kisses. And the lube got used. And everybody started talking to Kirk again, which was nice, at least until Chekov finally asked Sulu out a few seconds before there was another incident in the Romulan Neutral Zone that the Enterprise had to go deal with and it became really awkward between Chekov and Sulu and somehow Keenser got involved and then Scotty and Bones got everybody drunk and then somebody found Uhura and Chapel making out and told Kirk about it and Kirk told Spock about it during a party but Kirk thought everyone was drunk (because Scotty was present and bearing bottles and Bones was running around with hyposprays; actually Kirk wasn’t sure what that was about) but they weren’t and everybody heard and then nobody would speak to Kirk anymore, at least until he apologized to Uhura and Chapel and then helped Chekov and Sulu finally start dating, and Dear god, thought Kirk as Uhura said (with a laugh in her voice, that bitch), “Admiral Pike on subspace for you, Captain Kirk,” nobody told me that being the captain of a Federation starship was so fucking ridiculous.


End file.
